Panoramic Vistas
Panoramic photos from mountaintops
were developed in the mid 1930s to determine “seen” areas from those
mountaintops where wildfires could be spotted if a lookout were stationed
there. The photo above is a rare hand colored version of one of these black and
white photos. It is taken from a 7,500 foot elevation lookout site in Glacier
National Park, looking west over Lake McDonald, toward the city of Whitefish,
Montana. The Whitefish Range you can see on the horizon are about 30 miles away
to the west. There is an excellent website about this at the following link:
http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/research/panphoto.htm.
The page "Virtual Tour - What was it like to be a fire lookout in 1935?" from the link above features eight of these panoramic vistas from mountaintop lookouts in Glacier National Park, in the Quicktime format which you can manually scroll around.
Computer generated diagrammatic profiles which label what can be seen from mountains worldwide, such as the lookout vista from Mt. Diablo, can be viewed on the internet at this website:
http://www.viewfinderpanoramas.org/panoramas.html
Death Valley Panoramic Vista
This is a rotating panorama of
the vista around this lookout. It can be slow to load, but is worth waiting for.
Clicking on the panorama will stop its motion, and you can then click and
drag it manually at different speeds depending upon where you place your cursor
adjacent to the edge of the panorama. If
it does not appear, you may see a message at the top of the page asking you to
turn off your pop-up blocker to allow it to appear.
If you see a message in the panorama space reading “out of memory”,
just click over to one of the other links on this page, and then back in to this
one to make the panorama appear.
This "lookout vistas" website features panoramas
created with a computer program that stitches together images taken from
mountaintops with a digital camera, such as the one above taken from the
Aguereberry point vista, overlooking Death Valley, California.
In the first link above, at the bottom of the page, there are four links
to websites about doing actual on-site panoramic photography.
A website of 6,000 panoramic photos in the Western U.S. and Canada
includes these two panos from lookout vistas which you can visit:
8587 ft. el. Sierra Buttes fire lookout, northwest of the Lake Tahoe, California area – http://virtualguidebooks.com/NorthCalif/TahoeNorthernSierra/SierraButtes/SierraButtesLO_S.php
5155 ft. el. Cone Peak fire lookout in the Big Sur, Pacific Coast area of California - http://www.virtualguidebooks.com/CentralCalif/MontereyCentralCoast/ConePeak/ConePkLookoutSW_S.php. You may have to manually scroll this panorama around. To do this, "drag" the picture left or right, by left-clicking and simultaneously moving your mouse or finger on the touchpad a short distance to the left or right. To scroll faster, move your mouse or finger a longer distance.
Google Earth Panoramic Vistas
But with the development of the internet website "Google Earth", you can now make a virtual visit to view the panoramic vista from any mountain top right from your computer. Here is how to do it:
First you will have to download Google Earth on to your computer from this website: http://earth.google.com.
Here is an article on what Google Earth is all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Earth
In the upper lefthand corner of the
Google earth front page is a “search” form, where under the “fly to” tab
you can enter the latitude and longitude of the mountaintop you wish to see the
vista from. The coordinates you see entered in the example above are for Mt.
Diablo, California. ( 37 degrees,
52 minutes, 54 seconds, North; 121 deg., 54 min., 51 sec., West ). The red arrow
points to where that is located on the globe. After the coordinates are entered
in that box, click on the button with the magnifying glass symbol to the right
of that box. Google Earth will take you to a point 1,000 meters above that
point, and looking straight down at it.
You will then see a crosshair-in-a-square
symbol over that point. Place your cursor on that symbol and right click on it
to bring up a menu list, scroll down to the bottom of that box, and click on
“properties”. That will cause the “Edit Placemark” box shown in the
picture above to appear. When it does, select the tab labeled “view”, then
click on the button at the bottom of the form labeled “Snapshot current
view”. This will allow you to enter the “range” ( distance ) to that point
in the cross hair symbol, and the “tilt”, the angle you are looking down at
the view of the terrain.
Now change the range setting to 100
meters, so that your view is closer to the earth; enter a tilt of 70 degrees in
that box, and click on OK at the bottom of the page. You will now be looking
north across the Sacramento river Delta, up California’s Central Valley, as
shown in the picture above. The mountain on the horizon in the center of
that valley is Sutter Buttes, 91 miles away. The largest mountain on the left
hand horizon is 7,000 ft. elev. Snow Mountain. The mountains on the right hand
horizon are where the Sierras meet the Cascades. To get a complete view of the
vista, you can make the left-hand side bar panel disappear by clicking to drop
down the “view” menu, and clicking on “sidebar”, or by entering
Cntrl+Alt+B from the keyboard.
Since the range setting has you 300 feet offset from the mountain top, to
make the panorama rotate around the actual peak, use your cursor to drag the
cross hair symbol to the bottom of the computer screen. Then, to make the
panorama rotate around, use the controls shown on the right hand side of the
picture above. You must place the tip of your cursor EXACTLY where the tip
of the top red arrow is shown in the photo of the controls above: at the
right or left side of the iris in the eye symbol; and with the light blue shaded
area to the left or right of the eye symbol pointing precisely horizontal.
Then left clicking will make the panorama rotate slowly around. You will have to pause the rotation
occasionally by releasing the left click button on your mouse/keypad, to allow
the incoming streaming data to refresh the image.
Here are the co-ordinates of four famous West Coast mountains which you can view the panoramic vistas from on Google Earth, using the instructions above. ( Unless you are a mountain climber, you will probably never see these vistas otherwise ):
Telescope Peak, El. 11,049 ft. in California's Death Valley National Park, 38 10 12 N, 117 05 21 W
Mt. Shasta, El. 14,162 ft. highest Cascades volcanic peak, Northern california, 41 25 34 N, 122 59 11 W
Glacier Peak. El. 10,541 ft. in Washington state's North Cascades, 48 06 43 N, 121 06 48 W
Mt. Wrangell, Alaska, just across the border from the Yukon, Canada, 61 59 60 N, 143 59 60 W
Flying from peak to peak
After you have viewed the panoramic vistas from these lofty summits, another fun thing to do is to use Google Earth to fly from one of these mountain tops to the next, and back. To do that, first delete the coordinates from the search form and re-enter them. Now, when you bring up the properties box, change the range from the default 1000 meters to 30,000 meters. Then enter the direction in degrees (azimuth) from the peak you are over to the next one, and tilt the view to 70 degrees. Here are the azimuth coordinates to enter:
Flight from:
Telescope Peak to Mt. Shasta, 452 miles north along side the Sierra Nevada mtn. range, 324 degrees
Mt. Shasta to Glacier Peak, 467 miles north over the Cascades volcanic range, 6 degrees
Glacier Peak to Mt. Wrangell, north over the British Columbia coast range ice fields to Alaska, 326 degrees
Mt. Wrangell to Glacier Peak, 127 degrees
Glacier Peak to Mt. Shasta, south past Mt. Rainier and Mt. Hood, 187 degrees
Mt. Shasta to Mt. Telescope Peak., 141 degrees
To fly from peak to peak, place your
cursor EXACTLY as indicated by the tip of the bottom red arrow in the
photo above, precisely at the base of the fingers in the hand symbol, and making
sure that the light blue shaded area above the hand symbol is pointing precisely
vertical. Right click to begin your flight. You will have to pause the flight
motion occasionally by releasing the right click button on your mouse/keypad, to
allow the incoming streaming data to refresh the image.
Upgrading Your Peak to Peak Flight Ticket
The instructions above
were provided so that you can fly to and view the panorama from the mountaintop
of your choice. But direct links that will immediately take you to vistas
featured on this website, such as Golden
Gate to White Mt. and Mt.
Diablo to Mt. Tamalpais have been provided here. Clicking on these links may
take you directly to the vista, or your internet security software may bring up
a box you will need to check to do so. If you do not have Google Earth opened,
clicking on these links will first open it.
To allow your
computer to provide a smooth flight, you may wish to close all programs other
than your internet browser and Google Earth Program. Also, if you have one
of the pages on this website with a rotating panorama going on it, before you
start your flight, you should click in
that panorama to stop its rotation, so that your computer’s central processing
unit is not overloaded, and can provide a smooth flight.
The Google Earth navigation control for panning
around works well immediately, but you have to place your cursor exactly as
indicated in the explanation above to start the panorama rotating in a level
plane. (If your cursor is off slightly, the panorama will bank as it
turns.) However the navigation control that allows you to fly over into
and over the terrain has a problem starting the flight from a panoramic view
setting close to a mountain top. To correct this, place your cursor in the
center of the screen, and pull it downward about ½ inch. This moves your
viewpoint into the scene. Then you
should be able to engage the navigation control for forward flight.
The first link
above is set up as a higher altitude flight so that a broader sweep of terrain
can be seen; and so that you can avoid crashing into mountains en route, and
crashing the program. The second link is set to a lower altitude so that you can
make out ground level features that you would see driving through the terrain.
When flying a
higher altitude route, with the view tilt set at 70 degrees, you can dive down
towards features that you want to see by pushing the slider in the bottom Google
Earth Navigation control set UP; And then return to the higher cruising altitude
by pulling the slider control DOWN.
At the lower left
hand side of the Google Earth view page, at the bottom of the Side Bar when it
is opened, is the “layers” box – as shown in the picture below. If nothing
is selected in the many choices there, your flyovers and panoramas will just
show the satellite photographic imagery of the terrain. After you have made a
flyover pass this way, you may want to add some informational labels in the
view.
Then, click on the
“+” sign at the top of the layers list next to the “Geographic Web”
line. This will open up three choices, and you should check the “Wikipedia”
and “Places” boxes in those lines – as shown in the picture above. Now,
when you encounter a white box with a “W” in it in your Google Earth view,
like the one in the lower right hand corner of the picture above; or when you
encounter a blue box, like the one at the mountain peak in the upper left hand
part of the Google Earth screen in the picture above, you will be able to click
on those boxes to bring up a detailed description of that landscape feature.
Similarly, you should
click on the “+” sign next to the “borders and labels” line in the
layers list, and check the “Populated Places” box there. This will allow you
to see labels of cities, towns, etc., such as “Larkspur” next to the red
dot, in the lower right-hand corner of the picture above.
Finally, scroll down and click on the “+” sign next to the “Places of interest” line. When that list opens, scroll down and click on the “+” sign next to the “Geographic Features” line. When that sub list opens, check the “Mountains” and “USA Features” lines. This will allow you to see terrain feature names, such as the blue “Baltimore Canyon”, and green “Palm Hill” labels in the bottom left hand corner of the picture above. As you fly over the terrain, the green mountain icons will appear before their text does. For the nearer icons You can make this text appear, by running your hand cursor over the icon until it changes to an arrow. There are more of the blue terrain feature names at lower altitudes, so where avoiding terrain crashes permits, you may want to zoom down to a level where they appear.
Later, after you have
made flyovers and panoramic views with these labels, you may wish to add links
within the Google Earth view screen to other blue Panoramio boxes and Google
Earth Community “I” symbols that show where photographs have been made from
those locations.